George Stewart Jr.

Background

George Stewart, Jr. was born on November 26, 1848, in New York City, New York, United States, but, in 1851, his family moved to Canada. He was the son of George, a business manager, owner of a furniture store, and auctioneer, and Elizabeth (Dubuc) Stewart.

Education

Stewart was educated in the public school system in London, Ontario until 1859. Shortly after, his family moved to Saint John, New Brunswick. Stewart attended Upper Canada College where he received a diploma as a druggist and chemist.

Career

At sixteen, Stewart began the Stamp Collector’s Monthly Gazette, the first Canadian periodical devoted to philately. The magazine, an eclectic mixture of philately, political comment, local fiction, and poetry, was gradually revised to appeal to general readers and gave evidence of Stewart’s early interest in developing a platform for Canadian writing.

During the period from 1867 to 1872, Stewart dropped this Stamp Collector’s Monthly Gazette to establish Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine. As the only literary periodical at the time of Confederation, it quickly achieved national recognition. It earned Steward a lasting reputation among Canadian men of letters.

In Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine, which published fiction, poetry, biographical sketches, and criticism of British poetry, Stewart’s aim was to counter the flood of ‘trashy’ weeklies, ‘immoral’ monthlies, and dime novels from the United States by providing a forum for Canadian writers. While the Canadian reprint industry flourished on British and American best-sellers, local professional authorship was barely remunerative, even though many Canadians published abroad. His own Literary Quarterly survived because his publisher, George James Chubb, whom Stewart called ‘the John Murray of St. John,’ agreed to take no profits from the venture.

After selling his quarterly in 1871, Stewart served first as city editor of the Saint John Daily News and then as literary and dramatic editor of the Weekly Watchman. In 1877, he published his magazine sketches on contemporary authors as Evenings in the Library; much of his later reputation was due to reworked lectures on some of the same subjects: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, all of them major presences in late-nineteenth-century Canada.

In May 1878, Stewart moved to Toronto as editor of Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly, the country’s most distinguished magazine of literature and current affairs, and introduced both the illustrated article and serialized fiction by Americans, where previously only British and Canadian authors had been serialized. He left the periodical within a year because of a dispute - that he lost in court - over the royalties for his 1878 publication Canada under the Administration of the Earl of Dufferin. In the next quarter century, he contributed many literary and historical articles to magazines in Canada, the United States, and Britain, as well as to prestigious publications resulting in his international recognition. He also served as editor-in-chief of Quebec's Daily Chronicle.

Achievements

• George Stewart, Jr. is most commonly known for devoting much of his career as an editor and man of letters to the promotion of a national culture based on the history and the literature of both English and French Canadians.
  
  At a time when Canadian literature was facing crucial economic and cultural strains, Stewart worked for improved international copyright laws, publicized contemporary French-Canadian authors for American and English-Canadian audiences, and maintained (against considerable opposition at the time) that American and Canadian literature were distinct entities from British literature. Even today, when he is almost unknown, his style and judgments retain their graceful and colloquial force.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Evenings in the Library

    (Bits of Gossip About Books and Those Who Write Them)

    1879
  • The Story Of The Great Fire In St. John, N.b. 1877
  • Canada under the administration of the Earl of Dufferin 1878

Membership

Stewart was a member of the International Literary Congress and a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1882, as well as the secretary of English literature section. From 1885 to 1891, he was the president of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, a member of the Prince Society in Boston, Massachusets and an honorary member of the Athenaeum Club in London.

Personality

George Stewart was a respected lecturer, displaying exemplary public speaking skills. He devoted a great deal of time preparing for lectures, several of which appeared in print. He had an unmistakable love of literature, the subject of many of his talks.

Connections

On April 28, 1875, Stewart married Maggie M. Jewett. Almost a year after their marriage, Stewart's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, followed by the birth of their second daughter in January 1878. Two years later their third daughter was born. Their fourth daughter, Mabel Plaisted Stewart, was born in 1882, but only lived for nine months before dying of cholera infantum on 31 October 1882. In January 1884, Stewart and his wife had their fifth child, a son named Gilbert Murdock Stewart, who died from congestion of the brain at the young age of eight months.

Father:

George Stewart

Mother:

Elizabeth (Dubuc) Stewart

Wife:

Maggie M. Jewett

tutor:

William O. Smith

References

• A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950
  1951
• Historical Directory of New Brunswick Newspapers and Periodicals
  1961